For an instant he closed his eyes, smiling. The darkness was gone for ever. His head was on her heart, and it was her dear arms that were lifting him up, into the sunlight, the sunlight, the sunlight!
CHAPTER LV
KNOW ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS
Long, windless, golden days of spring and falling cherry-petals, with cloud-piles like fleecy pillars, with fringing palm-plumes and bamboo foliage turning from yellow cadmium to tawny green.
Drowsy, lotos-eating days of summer among purple hills wound in a luminous elfin haze. Days of typhoon and straight-falling rain. Sunsets of smouldering crimson and nights under a blue-black vault palpitating with star-swarms or a waste of turquoise, liquid with tropic moonlight.
Languorous days of autumn by the Inland Sea, when the dying summer's breath lingers like the perfume of incense, and the mirroring lilac water deepens to bishop's-purple.
So the mild Japanese winter comes—slowly, under a high, keen sky, bringing at last its scourging of dust and wind, its chill, opaque nights with their spectral fog veiling the trembling flames of the constellations, and its few, rare days when the evergreen earth is covered with a blanket of snow.
There came one such day when Daunt stood with Barbara by the huge stone torii at the gateway of the Mon-to temple on the Hill-of-the-Spirit. The air was softly radiant but not cold, the translucent heavens tinted with a fairy mauve, which on the horizon merged into dying hyacinth. The camelia hedges stood like blanched rows of crystalled beryl, the stalwart mochi trees were cased in argent armor, and the curving porch of the temple, the roof of the near-by nunnery, the forest of bronze lanterns and the square stone tablets in the graveyard were capped with soft rounded mounds of snow. It lay thickly over the paved space save where a wide way had been cleared to the temple steps, for the day was a saijits', a holy day, when the people gather to worship.
Across the lane they could see the Chapel lifting its white cross into the clear blue. From its chancel arch was hung a crucifix of gold-lacquer, where the declining sun, shining through the stained glass of the rose-window, each evening touched it to shimmering color. The altar to-day was fragrant with the first plum-blossoms; two hours ago the bishop, standing before it, had read the sacred office which had made them man and wife. The carriage which was to take them to Shimbashi Station waited now at the end of the lane while Barbara brought a branch of the early blooms to lay on a Buddhist grave in a tenantless garden.